Having grown up in the working class, Nicholas uses songwriting as both catharsis and self-discovery. He believes "that there is an ideal, honest way to live and through the writing process, I'll be able to find it".

With the release of his new EP "The Greatest Enemy”, Nicholas looks set to get back on the road and reconnect with audiences. To him, rediscovering that connection between audience and performer is "the best feeling on earth and I want to keep chasing it".

Why I Write

2018 marks 10 years since I began this solo project. After so long, I sometimes find myself losing sight of why I decided to pursue this crazy dream of mine.

Therefore I wanted to commit this to writing, so that I can always come back here and remind myself. At the same time, I wanted to give you the listener, whether you’ve just discovered my music or have known about me for years, an insight into the motivation behind these songs, behind the disparity between who I am on and off stage.

I guess the best place to start would be with the environment I grew up in. I come from a single parent household, where my mother repressed her emotions to provide for my sister and me. I went to a public school in the nineties, when young people thought it was cool to join gangs and unwarranted violence was part of life. My mother brought us to church on Sundays, where I was exposed to music and soon after picked up the guitar.

It wasn’t long before I began writing my own songs with the simple chords I knew. In songwriting, I found the only place where I could be vulnerable and thrive, a channel to express loneliness and other “negative” emotions that seemed unacceptable elsewhere. It’s never a competition of who had it worse growing up (there will always be someone worse off), but because of the habits I picked up from my mother, I felt there wasn’t anywhere else to express that part of me.

During the years of performing in now defunct emo band Vertical Rush, I experienced moments on stage when a song I wrote to work through a sense of loss touched an audience member deeply. In those moments, I felt connected. Not just to the audience in front of me, but to a universal energy much larger than me.

For me, that connection is the best feeling on earth and eventually, I decided to pursue that connection for the rest of my life. That is, to write personal songs that would mean something to someone, to let them know that they were not alone in their pain, to be their voice when they could not find the words. To do anything else would be essentially denying myself of my purpose and merely existing for the sake of it.

Thanks to the Internet and help from countless individuals, my music has travelled further than my younger self would’ve ever imagined. I consider myself very lucky to get to do what I love on a daily basis. Life is getting harder, but I never want to stop doing this. I consider it my lifelong vocation.

I don’t say it enough so again, thank you to everyone who has made this journey possible. I wouldn’t be where I am today without every person who has lent me their time and talent. Even if it’s only a single play on Spotify, you made a difference in my life. These songs are as much yours as they are mine. I hope they will continue to comfort and heal people in pain, even long after I’m gone.

I’m planning to write more of these blog posts to keep connecting with you in between my releases. Thank you for reading and I hope that you’ll keep checking back in.